This year the students in third, fourth, and fifth grade participated in their first student-led conference. This style of conferencing was new to the students as well as to the teachers preparing the students. Our team of teachers met several times to determine how we might organize the conference and help prepare the students to communicate successfully with parents. We discussed ideas for the layout of our conferences, grade appropriate expectations for the three groups, and investigated previous methods of student-led conferencing. Then we each individually outlined conferencing ideas we felt best fit the needs of our grade level.
I organized the fourth grader conference into several topics: personal reflections, goals for the upcoming year, an ePortfolio, top highlights of the year, and a life list of long-term goals. After ongoing language arts lessons revolving around the necessary topics, the students prepared written work as well as a collection of word processing documents, podcasting projects, and a PowerPoint project onto a disk to serve as an ePortfolio of ongoing works.
REFLECTION
Technology integration was a big part of my teaching this past year. It was my first time teaching all the core subjects to the same homeroom in over several years. I was really excited to enhance the content and learning experience of my students with all that I had learned in recent graduate studies.
As I researched student-led conferences, I frequently found examples that recommended using a portfolio collection of student work. I had collected hard copies of work throughout the year, but there were many projects produced with technology that were saved on the school server. I came up with an idea of burning all the different pieces of media onto a CD.
The CD allowed the students to access the collected items in any order while sharing with their parents during conferences. At the end of the conference the students were able to take home the ePortfolio for a permanent record of their work.
One problem I experienced that I will be more aware of next year was that one of my students deleted her files without direction thinking she was cleaning up her document folder on the server. I had not told the students to save files for the ePortfolio because I had not yet planned this project. Fortunately she had not emptied her trash and I was able to retrieve all but one file.
I organized the fourth grader conference into several topics: personal reflections, goals for the upcoming year, an ePortfolio, top highlights of the year, and a life list of long-term goals. After ongoing language arts lessons revolving around the necessary topics, the students prepared written work as well as a collection of word processing documents, podcasting projects, and a PowerPoint project onto a disk to serve as an ePortfolio of ongoing works.
REFLECTION
Technology integration was a big part of my teaching this past year. It was my first time teaching all the core subjects to the same homeroom in over several years. I was really excited to enhance the content and learning experience of my students with all that I had learned in recent graduate studies.
As I researched student-led conferences, I frequently found examples that recommended using a portfolio collection of student work. I had collected hard copies of work throughout the year, but there were many projects produced with technology that were saved on the school server. I came up with an idea of burning all the different pieces of media onto a CD.
The CD allowed the students to access the collected items in any order while sharing with their parents during conferences. At the end of the conference the students were able to take home the ePortfolio for a permanent record of their work.
One problem I experienced that I will be more aware of next year was that one of my students deleted her files without direction thinking she was cleaning up her document folder on the server. I had not told the students to save files for the ePortfolio because I had not yet planned this project. Fortunately she had not emptied her trash and I was able to retrieve all but one file.